Levi
Malott.

Malott has a way of explaining complex systems that reveals how he thinks. On the challenge of forest carbon monitoring, he put it this way: trees accumulate carbon slowly - like a battery charging - but they release it instantly, like a capacitor discharging. A wildfire doesn't ask permission. That reality meant Pachama couldn't rely on the traditional approach of measuring forests every few years. They needed to measure constantly.

"We fundamentally believe that nature is going to be a very important part of fighting climate change," Malott said in a podcast interview. "We need to quantify biomass faster, more accurately, and more frequently than humans can."

That's not a marketing line - it's an engineering constraint. And it forced Pachama to build something no one had built before: a platform that fused satellite imagery, machine learning, and rigorous carbon accounting standards into a product that real investors and regulators would trust. Malott was managing the engineering team that built it, while scaling that team from seven to forty people.

The three types of carbon market projects Pachama dealt with - reforestation (full tree lifecycle), conservation (protecting existing forests), and improved forest management - each came with different measurement challenges, different compliance requirements, and different stakeholder expectations. Running the engineering team across all three was less a technical problem than a coordination one. Malott excelled at exactly that.

Redbud VC was founded by Willy Schlacks and Jabbok Schlacks - the entrepreneurs who built EquipmentShare into a $3 billion company - to back tech founders from Middle America. It's a deliberate bet: that great founders exist outside San Francisco and New York, and that a VC firm embedded in the same geography, with the same cultural context, can back them better.

Malott fits that thesis perfectly. He's a Missourian through and through - educated at Missouri S&T, based in Columbia. He's built across industries that matter in the middle of the country: energy, agriculture-adjacent climate tech, healthcare. He's not an outsider coaching founders. He's one of them.

As Venture Partner, he brings something genuinely rare: direct operator experience at multiple companies, across multiple stages, in multiple industries. He's been employee #7. He's been the CTO who raised the seed round. He's managed 40-person engineering teams. He's shipped rocket software. The advice he gives founders comes from having been in their exact position - not from a partner meeting in a Sand Hill Road conference room.

Redbud's focus on "tech founders strengthened by struggle" is exactly the kind of mandate that resonates with someone who spent years doing hard, unglamorous engineering before the VC world came calling.